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Historic makeover: Harriet Tubman to be face on $20 bill

This image provided by the Library of Congress shows Harriet Tubman, between 1860 and 1875. (H.B. Lindsley, Library of Congress via AP)

WASHINGTON — Harriet Tubman, the African-American abolitionist who was born a slave, will stand with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin among the iconic faces of U.S. currency.

The $20 bill will be redesigned with Tubman's portrait on the front, marking two historic milestones, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced Wednesday. She will be the first African-American on U.S. paper money and the first woman depicted in 100 years.

The leader of the Underground Railroad will replace the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh president and a slave owner, who will be pushed to the back of the bill.

Lew also settled the backlash that had erupted after he announced an initial plan to remove Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first Treasury secretary, from the $10 bill to honor a woman.

Hamilton will remain on the $10 note, Lew said.

Hamilton's starring role on paper currency had seemed threatened, thanks to the immutable forces of bureaucracy. His bill was up next for a redesign right as President Barack Obama decided to finally put a woman on one.

But something else Hamilton couldn't have fathomed — a Pulitzer-prize-winning hip-hop musical of his life becoming a hit that very same year — probably played a role in keeping the $10 bill all to himself. Well, that and the fact that a viral campaign and women at the highest levels of political power wanted Hamilton to stay and someone else — specifically, Jackson — to go.

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The original plan to replace Hamilton with a woman on the $10 seemed to catch off-guard the advocates of putting a woman on U.S. currency, who had exclusively focused their efforts on the $20 bill that frames the face of Jackson, a controversial supporter of slavery and the relocation of American Indians.

At first, backlash to Hamilton was kind of muted. It was tough to complain about finally getting a woman on a bill, but it also wasn't really what advocates wanted. "I'm excited to hear that our mission will be accomplished," Women on 20s director Susan Ades Stone told The Washington Post's Ylan Q. Mui and Abby Ohlheiser. She added she was resigned to letting Jackson stay on because it'd be quicker to swap out the $10.

But as Ohlheiser reported, advocates felt there were solid reasons for getting rid of Jackson. Slate initially pitched the idea of doing away with the seventh U.S. president's face on the $20 bill in 2014, writing: "Andrew Jackson engineered a genocide. He shouldn't be on our currency."

Women on 20s, or W20, picked up the idea and ran with it. Earlier in 2015, before Lew's announcement, it coordinated an online campaign to replace Jackson. It went viral. More than 600,000 voters nominated Tubman, the nation's most famous abolitionist and the conductor of the Underground Railroad, to replace the man that one could argue is her polar opposite.

W20 added its own convincing arguments for why Jackson should go. If the $20 honored a woman by 2020, it also would mark the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage, which would be neat. Plus, no one's actually sure why Jackson ended up on the bill in the first place back in 1928. The man didn't even like paper currency, favoring gold and silver coins.

And if the Treasury was feeling pressure for its decision not to boot Jackson, it was also getting an increasing amount of pressure for its decision to boot Hamilton. The ethnically and musically diverse Broadway hit "Hamilton" was becoming too popular to ignore. (The play won its Pulitzer just two days ago.)

A relatively overlooked founding father became the epitome of cool, and suddenly the fight to change the $20 over the $10 became as much about honoring a woman as it was about protecting the legacy of a man.

This month, Hillary Clinton told a New York Daily News editorial board meeting she'd "keep Hamilton where he is." He was a New Yorker, an immigrant and one of George Washington's closest aides, she said, according to the paper.

Oh, and she liked the musical.

Tubman, born into slavery in the early part of the 19th century, escaped and used the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad to transport other slaves to freedom. After the Civil War, Tubman, who died in 1913, became active in the campaign for women's suffrage.

Various groups have been campaigning to get a woman honored on the nation's paper currency, which has been an all-male domain for more than a century.

The last woman featured on U.S. paper money was Martha Washington, who was on a dollar silver certificate from 1891 to 1896. The only other woman ever featured on U.S. paper money was Pocahontas, from 1865 to 1869. Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea are on dollar coins.

The Washington Post and the Associated Press contributed to this report

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